Performance Reviews Are the Worst Moment to Discuss Things for the First Time

Picture this scenario -a not too uncommon one-. It’s year’s end or your anniversary at your job and your boss summons you to his office: it’s performance evaluation time!

You both sit down and you are confident you have been a great employee; always on top of your work, responsible, punctual, you never call out but… surprise, surprise!… the feedback you just got is not all bright and shiny.

Whaaaat?! you weren’t supposed to do that thing you did back in May?!

WTF!!! And now you are finding out about it… well, kind of; because you knew that what you did wasn’t exactly the expected procedure but no one ever told you anything, so you guessed it wasn’t that bad… it was actually okay, so maybe you kept doing it that way.

So, what was supposed to be a surprise-free summary of your year, turned into a heated argument with your boss. In my opinion, it’s sheer masochism; on both sides.

This is a very common problem found throughout performance review meetings all around the world: lack of continuous feedback throughout the year.

On the manager’s side, it’s a performance issue. You should have been MBWA (managing by walking around) and giving praise or correction as soon as you detected that a task was being done sub-par or that someone’s performance was below the expectations.

But -scenario A-, that day you didn’t feel like giving feedback and left it for later.

Scenario B, you found out about what your employee did by hearsay or gossip and it was already too late to give feedback.

BS!

a)It’s never too late; or b)you are probably one of those supervisors that are afraid to confront employees or you are plainly too lazy.

If you had given timely feedback your employee would have been able to improve his performance, get a higher score at the performance evaluation and you both would have evaded an unnecessary argument.

On the subordinate’s side, it’s your fault too.

What?! My fault!

Yes, your fault. You are not as much at fault as your boss but you are still guilty: if you knew that what you were doing wasn’t exactly what you were expected to do, you should’ve asked.

Avoid leaving for later something that can be done in 2 minutes and you will both:

Image credit, Lumax Art 

Article by Fernando

The guy in charge of this blog - husband, Psychologist, former Manager, Blogger, Job Coach, Recruiter and Information Junkie. Yes, I am all that.

Fernando has written 254 awesome articles for us at FT Careers

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